The only downside I see to the cube solution is that it does give you the additional hassle of carting around a display and PC keyboard. So there's that.
Hi Keith,
You can get a very small wireless keyboard that has an integrated glide-point for mouse duty.
Since you won't be doing much yping at the gig, the small keyboard works great.
Easily fits into the padded case with the Cube.
Doesn't sound like you'll be running that heavy of a load with virtual instruments.
The lower the load, the more practical a laptop becomes.
Keep in mind that laptops with slower clocked i7 CPUs can actually be slower than a higher clocked i5.
Also, Omnisphere is excellent for use in a typical bar-band scenario (great classic synth sounds).
To run glitch-free at a 48-sample ASIO buffer size, you need a lot of speed... and DPC latency that's very low/consistent.
The trade-off with the Cube (slightly more cartage)... but you'll never give performance a second thought. With a mediocre laptop, you'd likely have to set the ASIO buffer size to 128 or 256 samples.
Once you start using high-quality VSTi live, there's no going back.
